Thursday, April 21, 2016

NYC: Up To $250,000 Fine For Failing To Use A Person's Preferred Name, Pronoun or Title

Utter lunacySnopes on the law...or guidelines on enforcing a law, whatever that means... Scary in part because Snopes spins its conclusion so shamelessly in the PC direction. The claim Snopes was asked to evaluate is true: you can be fined for failing to accord with people's preferences with respect to the pronouns you use to refer to them. They spun it into a mostly true by pretending they'd been asked whether one could be so fined for doing so accidentally. I don't want to sound like any more of a kook than I already do...but this kind of spin is pervasive when it comes to such issues. Soft-pedal the obviously crazy things on the leftier side of things, exaggerate the mistakes and craziness on the rightier side of things...it's difficult for me to believe that that sort of thing doesn't add up... At any rate: the claim in question is true. Period.
As the law is written, you can be fined a quarter of a million dollars if you refuse to use a made-up, non-English "pronoun" like 'zir' when someone prefers it. In some places it is suggested that it is use of non-preferred terms that is punishable. In others, it is failure to use terms you've been told someone wants you to use.
So...according to this law, someone can insist that you call them Zargon the Magnificent, XIIIth Emperor of Reality, and you can be fined a quarter of a million dollars for failing to comply. They can make up fake pronouns on the spot, or use some canned nonsense like 'hir'; whatever the case, if you're told what they want you to say, you must comply.The law doesn't even get the sex/gender distinction right...but it tells you that you must speak as the looniest member of the gender studies department wants you to speak. It claims that sex is partially a matter of "gender expression," which is wildly false.
This is utter madness. The fact that something like this could be anywhere in the vicinity of a law is nearly unbelievable. I really don't have the words to express how insane this is. How could something so firmly based in incoherent radical-left crackpottery make it into law?